Munich is a very liveable city.
Munich is a very livable city, provided you have adequate housing, financial means, a secure job, and leisure time.
For many of our fellow citizens, this is a distant dream. However, this is particularly true for apprentices from third countries.
It is no longer mere city gossip that these participation grounds are being withheld from this particular milieu. Precarious training conditions are no longer a fringe phenomenon in Munich, but a noticeably growing problem.
An SZ article from 30.11.2025 describes this problem vividly (paywall link: https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/muenchen-auslaendische-azubis-prekaere-lebensverhaeltnisse-li.3326343?reduced=true ):
Reports speak of weeks of work without days off, months without holidays, and 60 to 70-hour weeks. Of activities that have nothing to do with formal training. Of employers who are also landlords. This is a serious point of leverage against young people: if they lose their jobs, they face the simultaneous loss of their housing and, often, their residence permit. A vocational school principal quoted in the article refers to this as de facto legalised human trafficking.
All of this is happening against the backdrop of a perpetually grinning recruitment marketing campaign by the federal government under the slogan „Make it in Germany“.
That's pathetic.
Together with youth work services in Munich, my wonderful colleague Claudia Greinwald and I are trying to approach this problem and the human tragedies behind it from a legal perspective. In the best-case scenario, this will lead to structural improvements.
We are still looking for fellow campaigners for this project.
If you're a lawyer, work „in something to do with media“, are socially and politically engaged, or can translate, please get in touch with Claudia or me.
There are enough tasks for currently too few heads and hands.
The urban population is not an abstract object. You constitute the urban population; you can shape it, mould it and bring in your values, and not just by ticking a box in the polling booth on 08.03.2026.